Tag: Demographics

In our lastblog post, we chronicled the continuing demise of the American middle class. Now, we turn to the equality disaster evident in the most recent U.S. demographics. A new General Accountability Office (GAO)studyconfirms that millennials (those aged 18-37) are rapidly losing any chance of doing better than their parents and trends are extraordinarily inauspicious for NextGen followers. Inter-generational economic mobility was once as much a hallmark of America as its robust middle class – in 1970, 92 percent of 30-year-olds made more money in inflation-adjusted terms than their parents did at similar ages even though the 1970 economy was considerably weaker than the prewar boom. Now, millennials are far, far behind their parents.Looking at wealth share,* baby-boomers owned 21 percent of U.S. net wealth when they turned 35 (1990 on average).Continue reading “American Millennials: The Generation the Recovery Left Behind”→

Janet Yellen,Ben Bernanke, andJerome Powellhave each bemoaned U.S. economic inequality and then asserted that it’s everyone else’s fault. On the blog and in ourspeeches,we counter that post-crisis monetary and regulatory policy had an unintended but nonetheless dramatic and destructive impact on the income and wealth divides. In doing so, we often point to just how much worse and how much faster inequality became as post-crisis policy took hold. Demographics, technology, and trade policy didn’t change anywhere near that much that fast. Now,anew studyfrom the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis takes the story forward with a trove of data evaluating U.S. economic inequality from 1949 through 2016. For all the recovery and employment the Fed cites in its equality defense, these data tell a far different tale. Continue reading “It’s Worse Than You Thought”→